Can you share this analysis across a longer time span?
For starters. There are so many possibilities here that any attempt to even think of a trend let alone what it's caused by, is wrong :) On the other hand: without knowing number of users, number of who's hring posts, when they were posted, location, ...: still really hard to give any sensible meaning to it. Just nice to look at.
I'm running the script from January 2018. However, covid was really disruptive, so I don't know what we'll be able to see. Anyway, I'll paste a link to the plot when it's done.
That's a nice way to visualize it. To me the best way to check the market conditions is to check your LinkedIn inbox.
The number of recrutiers spamming with job offers has gone way down. I even had a situation where the recruiter who was supposed to hire me, got laid off during my final interview alongiside a big chunk of the company...
I've actually had the opposite start happening this week, although that could just be a random blip. For a while I was only getting one or two per week, this week I've already had five.
Not the author, but quickly ran a script over "Who wants to be hired?" from Jan-2021 to March-2023 and here is the resulting plot of the top-level comments (where indent="0"): https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png
So I was perhaps the inventor of "who wants to be hired" (I had asked to be able to post that thread, and was told that I needed to wait two days... anyway someone ran with it, and I am happy that you have made this thread.
We have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.
The US BLS has 6 different unemployment measures. The one that's usually quoted is U-3 which means unemployed but seeking work. But if you left the country, I assume you're not counted in any unemployment measurement. (Though I also assume that's a sufficiently unusual edge case that it doesn't really move the needle on any of the statistics.)
In the US, you're not "unemployed" if you don't have a job and you don't want one.
I believe if you're a US citizen vacationing long-term in France because your work prospects aren't great at the moment - you'll still show up as not in the labor force in the labor force participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
But you won't show up in u-1 through u-6.
> Discouraged workers (U-4, U-5, and U-6 measures) are persons who are not in the labor force, want and are available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months
In general, it doesn't really make sense to count someone who isn't trying to be employed as unemployed in general. I am not sure how you would distinguish between a 60 year old who decided they had plenty of money and would rather not work for someone any longer and a 60 year old who got laid off and can't find anyone to hire them for the work they are trained to do.
And, as you say, there are labor force participation numbers if that's what you're interested in.
Maybe I haven't been reading too closely and have missed the answer, but how many of the laid off employees were on work visas that are now also looking at having to leave the country? Since it's tech companies, I'd assume there's a decent percentage. How do those types of numbers affect the unemployment stats?
I expect that if you combine the percentage of H1Bs at tech companies, the percentage of layoffs in tech overall, and the percentage of that number who can't find something else and have to or choose to leave the country you end up with a fairly modest number in the scheme of things.
What I've been seeing with the caveat that I may just be more aware of the senior people is a significant number of people with 10+ years tenure at the company leaving.
Thats what suprized me as well. I have one friend who was level 7 at google on the youtube team. His whole team was cut in the 1st round of layoffs.
He had been at google for 12 years.
We have already announced there will be no bonuses for 12 months. However we are quite obviously not going to go out of business, and people have higher-end salaries, so I think people just want to stay where it's safe.
This is my unpopular take on the layoffs at extremely profitable companies
Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company)
After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they were the ones hiring, cue layoffs. People will crap on Google or Salesforce "why did you hire so much?" - but during the great resignation - what were they supposed to do?
This isn’t very unpopular. Most tech companies demonstrably hired at the same rate but as the base number grew, each new quarter brought in more people. And yes, attrition crashed when they announced hiring freezes. At companies like Google, the layoff count was similar to expected attrition.
That's interesting. To me it actually looks like the opposite. The share of remote work eligible postings as a fraction of total postings seems to be higher than before?
The downturn is hitting all companies and all jobs. It’s bad out there.
What’s perverse, and not being discussed enough, is that this is an engineered recession. Rather than admit our economy no longer works, the Fed can alternate between low and high interest rates (inflation or unemployment, take your pick) and so, even though bad things are happening, the fact that it’s different bad stuff each year makes it look like the Fed is doing something.
Yeah, well, if they were to heat up the economy some other way than paying rich people to invest, or cool it down some other way than paying rich people to not invest, it would upset the only people who matter.
Somehow those policies became the only acceptable ones a government can issue. Worldwide and through all the societies.
It is also an obvious cause of instability, because once you pay rich people to change their investments, it takes a huge amount of time until anything on the real economy changes. I really doubt policy makers run PDI algorithms over their data to attenuate that delay.
FY 2020 (Oct 1, 2019-Sept 30, 2020) was a sharp increase in the deficit, 2021 and 2022 were decreases, 2023 YTD is an increase over the same period in FY 2022.
Its nothing like hockeystick growth.
EDIT: I suppose if you overenthusiastically extrapolate from, like, just the last three data points the trade rather than budget deficit might distantly resemble that, but...
everyone is exorbitantly indebted to everyone. At some point, someone has to put some reality back into the simulacrum because simulacrum does not feed your family
Can you suggest reading to learn more about this viewpoint?
To me, the technological advances seem to be a product of the economic system. As long as the economic system can be sustained, then it is likely that human welfare will continue to improve.
It's no question that certain people having exorbitant amounts of wealth allows them to perform technological feats that would not be otherwise possible, but this does not mean it is otherwise sustainable as a system. Increasing debt can provide a short-term boost to industry, but long term there is no way to stop the financial sector from 'eating' the whole economy.
I would recommend picking up First Principles of Islamic Economics by Al-Mawdudi.
If you graph the % I think it'd look more noisy, at least when I look carefully it's not actually following it as close as it feels when I first look at the graph.
I am defiantly feeling it from the number of recruiters emailing me about various opportunities. It's nice because I'm never interested in any of these jobs. I always find my next job through my network anyways.
Anecdotally, recruiter emails are back for me after a ~6 month lull. I'm not sure if it's a hopeful sign that both the bubble and the backlash are behind us and things are normalizing, or a bad sign that the over-hiring lesson hasn't been learned and there is more pain yet to come.
This trues up with what I'm anecdotally seeing in my clients. RTO-3 days or even RTO-5 days is being pushed aggressively in some of them, and the general feeling amongst their rank and file is it is a stealth layoff (no severance for those leaving due to the policy switch is a big financial incentive for the companies). A big challenge I'm not seeing really addressed though is a lot of staff at my clients stepped up big time to do more with less during the pandemic and put in more than full time hours, reasoning that they'll just work during what normally would have been their commute time. That slack their companies enjoyed is now being yanked out of the ecosystem as many simply don't have more to give once they start commuting again. Quite a few put in even put in way more.
I saw this organically happen both pre- and post-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, it was rare if a Slack or email I sent to client staff was answered off hours. During the latter half of the pandemic and post-pandemic with those in WFH situations, it became much more common as staff learned to communicate all the time during brief idling periods while going about their off hours days and evenings. I'm going to miss this low-latency communication, but it is what it is.
If this is an actual secular trend instead of mere n=1 anecdata, then it will stack on the demographic trend baked in of ever-fewer workers for the next 20-odd years (assuming there is a baby boom in the next 3-4 years, which by current family and household formation statistical trends is still looking unlikely).
I’m fully remote atm and checks slack when I’m off work all the time. If I were to commute 50 mins each way, I wouldn’t be looking at slack after work for sure, hell even 10min commute will make me dislike my job, just thinking of having to get up early to walk my dog..
yeah, I have a 10 minute commute right now, and I hate it
I have to walk all the way across the building to a phone room every time I need to make a phone call, and the rooms are usually all full. Which means I have to hide in the mail room or walk a couple of blocks out to my car.
The office is full of minor annoyances like broken elevators, full bathrooms, no coffee creamer, etc. It's super obnoxious.
I'm trying not to be a spoiled /r/antiwork jerkbag here, but I really hate this job, haha.
> How are the big companies going to justify any effort they put against climate change?
Watch what they do, not what they say, I guess. Maybe it's mostly greenwashing?
The pandemic lockdowns were probably as close as we're ever going to get to observing how much a drastically reduced transport-intensive footprint is capable of helping the environment. If a lot of tension arises out of increasing RTO and shrinking labor pools, it will be interesting to watch how it resolves out.
I did some application tests recently. I don't think I can even get an interview right now. Maybe if I tried python/node/javascript/ruby I could, but typed languages are tight competition for not many offerings.
Update: Actually just got an interview so it's not so so bad.
Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA?
I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
Anecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.
Do you get the sense it’s for profit padding or is there a downturn in business? If there is a downturn in business, is that downturn related to Covid measures at the consumer or business level?
I work for a smaller company (< 200 employees) and it's similar. We are still hiring additional engineers but we've let go some project people as well as our scrum masters. Scrum masters at least do feel like they don't justify their salary to me really, it isn't as if the team leads don't have to be in all the meetings they run so may as well have the team leads run them
Naively, the category seems to be "high growth tech". So that includes both the SV megacorps and startups (which are also concentrated in the Bay Area).
From what I've seen it's less pronounced in the EU. Recruiters I know say that things are slower than in 2022 but it's still healthy. And my direct vicinity still looks short on workers and high on demand.
I was seriously considering government work, but they all seem to want TS clearances. I’m simply not interested in the process. Do you have any recommendations for anywhere that doesn’t have this requirement?
Yep, same. Somewhere relatively stable and doing a public good sounds great, but I'm not bothering with security clearances or the myriad other red tape required at almost all of those roles, especially for almost always significantly less comp than the private sector :\",
At least in Germany, I'm not seeing any signs for a major downturn in IT. At least on the hiring side, it actually seems to be even harder to fill mid-to-senior technical roles than last year at this time, and it wasn't exactly easy then either. Hearing similar takes from several companies, all of them still on hiring sprees.
Very much this I think. Actual Senior devs (10+ years, fullstack from react down to AWS or bare metal, leadership xp, even DevSecOps skills, …) and offers below 100k are simply a joke. Of course these 500k+ compensations of SV are not usual in Germany, but thanks to remote most senior guys I know earn much more than what is offered locally
Higher interest rates mean that investments in technologies that will pay off in the long run have to have a higher ROI than they did a year ago, hence less money going into them and layoffs at some places. I'd be super surprised if this reached across all programming or associated jobs.
This is entirely anecdotal. A local company here advertised for a developer position that was pretty well paid (regional Australia). They got a lot of interest from overseas developers but the really interesting applications came from "system architects" rather than developers.
I speculated that the layoffs in Australia are quietly happening amongst tech middle management / developer adjacent jobs but those quiet layoffs are encouraging everybody else to stay put for the moment.
Presumably the right-most data point is from yesterday (3/1/23). Isn't there a potential flaw here in regards to that most recent data point? Whereas in previous months people had all month to post jobs to the monthly job posting thread, there has only been one day since the 3/1/23 job post thread was started. I think this script should be run on the last day of the month, not the first.
It you really want to model this correctly (more than just, it looks like it's going down) you would need to adjust for seasonal factors as well. At least in this data it looks like February postings are always higher than January, but this year they are not as much higher as they normally would be.
I'd love to see a study of trends of generic positive/negative words used across all HN article comments. That might be revealing of the "state of tech", though not necessarily specific to employment.
I wonder if it correlates with a /general/ loss of traffic. Personally I find the comments section to be less accepting of more classes of opinions each year.
Hmmm what could possibly fnordpiglet meant when he said what he said... but then again, each consecutive comment may or may not have been serious. Including this one.
Categorical rejection is an ideological overessentialization which seeks to create an other to function as a target of not only division and ridicule but to function normatively to buttress an existing predominant neoliberal self-narrative. </zizek>
Thanks for sharing this! Grouping by year, it looks like stories peaked in 2020 but comments continued to grow.
I am curious if the growth in comment count could be correlated with factors like more downvoted/hidden comments, more new comment-only reddit style users, more back and forth argument comments etc. or if it is genuinely healthy community growth.
Script was probably run too early to be comparable to older posts, right? March Who is hiring thread is now close to 500 total comments (guessing around 20 of those are not job posts?)
I wish the data would go a bit further back. Pretty sure 200-300 job posts was normal around 2017-2018, with the industry doing just fine. The 1000 jobs per post in 2021 were an abnormality.
119 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] thread- Can you share this analysis across a longer time span?
- Maybe there's a way to normalize it to general activity on HN? It probably hasn't gone down, but it would be cleaner to do that.
For starters. There are so many possibilities here that any attempt to even think of a trend let alone what it's caused by, is wrong :) On the other hand: without knowing number of users, number of who's hring posts, when they were posted, location, ...: still really hard to give any sensible meaning to it. Just nice to look at.
Edit: typo.
The number of recrutiers spamming with job offers has gone way down. I even had a situation where the recruiter who was supposed to hire me, got laid off during my final interview alongiside a big chunk of the company...
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765
I propose the following:
WHO HAS BEEN HIRED and metrics on such.
I believe if you're a US citizen vacationing long-term in France because your work prospects aren't great at the moment - you'll still show up as not in the labor force in the labor force participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
But you won't show up in u-1 through u-6.
> Discouraged workers (U-4, U-5, and U-6 measures) are persons who are not in the labor force, want and are available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months
Source: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
And, as you say, there are labor force participation numbers if that's what you're interested in.
Hiring rates skyrocketed during covid, but so did attrition rates (well, the same people joining Google left some other company)
After big tech started freezing hiring in summer 2022, attrition rates most likely tanked, people wanted to stay put. 6-8 months later, companies ended up with way more employees than they planned, even though they were the ones hiring, cue layoffs. People will crap on Google or Salesforce "why did you hire so much?" - but during the great resignation - what were they supposed to do?
Gee, I dunno, maybe NOT double in size like Salesforce did?
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/num...
What’s perverse, and not being discussed enough, is that this is an engineered recession. Rather than admit our economy no longer works, the Fed can alternate between low and high interest rates (inflation or unemployment, take your pick) and so, even though bad things are happening, the fact that it’s different bad stuff each year makes it look like the Fed is doing something.
Somehow those policies became the only acceptable ones a government can issue. Worldwide and through all the societies.
It is also an obvious cause of instability, because once you pay rich people to change their investments, it takes a huge amount of time until anything on the real economy changes. I really doubt policy makers run PDI algorithms over their data to attenuate that delay.
What do you mean our economy no longer works?
Its nothing like hockeystick growth.
EDIT: I suppose if you overenthusiastically extrapolate from, like, just the last three data points the trade rather than budget deficit might distantly resemble that, but...
Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded?
> At some point, someone has to put some reality back into the simulacrum because simulacrum does not feed your family
Aren’t poverty, famine, and food scarcity at record lows?
They were temporarily alleviated thanks to technological advances.
To me, the technological advances seem to be a product of the economic system. As long as the economic system can be sustained, then it is likely that human welfare will continue to improve.
I would recommend picking up First Principles of Islamic Economics by Al-Mawdudi.
I saw this organically happen both pre- and post-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, it was rare if a Slack or email I sent to client staff was answered off hours. During the latter half of the pandemic and post-pandemic with those in WFH situations, it became much more common as staff learned to communicate all the time during brief idling periods while going about their off hours days and evenings. I'm going to miss this low-latency communication, but it is what it is.
If this is an actual secular trend instead of mere n=1 anecdata, then it will stack on the demographic trend baked in of ever-fewer workers for the next 20-odd years (assuming there is a baby boom in the next 3-4 years, which by current family and household formation statistical trends is still looking unlikely).
I have to walk all the way across the building to a phone room every time I need to make a phone call, and the rooms are usually all full. Which means I have to hide in the mail room or walk a couple of blocks out to my car.
The office is full of minor annoyances like broken elevators, full bathrooms, no coffee creamer, etc. It's super obnoxious.
I'm trying not to be a spoiled /r/antiwork jerkbag here, but I really hate this job, haha.
Sounds stupid but forced return to office will also do enormous damage to the environment
Watch what they do, not what they say, I guess. Maybe it's mostly greenwashing?
The pandemic lockdowns were probably as close as we're ever going to get to observing how much a drastically reduced transport-intensive footprint is capable of helping the environment. If a lot of tension arises out of increasing RTO and shrinking labor pools, it will be interesting to watch how it resolves out.
Probably write it on the way to Davos in their private jet for the climate conference they'll issue it at.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773972
Feel free to use the historical data, I haven’t had time to update for Jan and Feb 2023!
Update: Actually just got an interview so it's not so so bad.
I think there's plenty of people that have got used to an inflated salary, so offering "local market rate" won't cut it.
Time will tell if the global downturn will lead to reverting to norm (especially as a lot of companies seem to be moving away from fully remote).
I speculated that the layoffs in Australia are quietly happening amongst tech middle management / developer adjacent jobs but those quiet layoffs are encouraging everybody else to stay put for the moment.
https://sql.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3Rhcn...
I am curious if the growth in comment count could be correlated with factors like more downvoted/hidden comments, more new comment-only reddit style users, more back and forth argument comments etc. or if it is genuinely healthy community growth.
EDIT: The second link provides more insights: https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2021/percentage-of-hacker-news...
Most likely, there is just nothing to see, we are still in the process of being back to normal from the pandemic bubble.
This chart paints a very dishonest picture.